Ricerc@Sapienza

Objective
to investigate the effect of age at CI activation and to explore the role of other variables such as linguistic skills, stimulation modality and gender on reading comprehension.
Study Design
Prospective observational nonrandomized study.
Methods

This study investigated the effect of speech rate for Italian-speaking cochlear implant (CI) users with the aim of gaining insight into everyday listening situations where speaker’s rate may vary considerably together with speech level in fluctuating background noise. The test material was prepared by processing the Italian STARR test with temporal compression of sentence material. Twelve adult CI users were divided into two subgroups based on their STARR performance: good and poor performers. The effect of varying speech rate was remarkable for both subgroups.

Purpose Cochlear implant (CI) users show great difficulty for understanding speech in noise and this fact may partly stem from their poor low-frequency (LF) pitch perception and temporal fine structure (TFS) processing. Clinical assessment of pitch perception is usually based on non-speech tasks. However, linguistically relevant contexts such as lexical stress may better reflect the role of pitch in speech perception, especially for everyday speech where background noise is inevitable.

Purpose
The objectives of this study are to evaluate cochlear implant (CI) listeners’ ability to infer low frequency (LF) pitch information from temporal fine structure (TFS) cues and to gain insight into its effects on speech perception, especially in the presence of a fluctuating background noise. Pitch perception assessment using linguistic stimuli is believed to better reflect the role of pitch in communicatively realistic situations.
Methods